Malagnini studied trombone at the conservatory in Brescia; his voice was only discovered during military service. He switched to the
Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milano, and studied singing in the class of Pier Miranda-Ferraro. In 1983, he won a singing competition organized by Tito Gobbi; as a result, he took
additional lessons with Gobbi and with Giuseppe Di Stefano. The following year, he won
three further competitions (one of them the Belvedere Competition in Vienna), and made his debut in Il corsaro in Milano.
A long and distinguished international career ensued: La Scala (1986 debut), Rome, Bologna, Arena di Verona, Macerata Festival, Teatro
La Fenice, Firenze, Trieste, Pisa, Rovigo, Cagliari, Modena, Piacenza, Genova, Frankfurt, Essen, Munich (where he sang a lot), Deutsche
Oper Berlin, Ludwigsburg Festival, Dresden, Bonn, Köln, Hamburg, Wiesbaden, Solothurn Classics (a festival where he was a regular
in the early 2000s), Lausanne, Vienna Staatsoper, Budapest, Sofia, Rousse (which was to become the center of his activity in the last
few years of his career), Moscow (Bolshoj), Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Glyndebourne Festival, Nice, Monte Carlo, Oviedo,
Madrid, Lisbon, Málaga, Bilbao, Santiago de Chile, Palm Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Cape Town, Seoul.
His repertory went from Alfredo to Pollione and Radames, all at the same time; the roles he sang most often must have been Pinkerton and
Don José. But he also appeared in more elusive works: Ruy Blas, Leoncavallo's Bohème, La battaglia di
Legnano; and he was Danilo at the Arena di Verona (1999)!
I heard him in 2012 as Gabriele Adorno in an open air performance in Zvolen (Slovakia), and he was still in definitely decent
voice. He seems to have retired in 2018.
Reference 1: Kutsch & Riemens, reference 2, reference 2
